Vietnam state oil company urges US Navy to allow tanker through blockade, document shows

By Florence Tan, Jonathan Saul and Phil Stewart

SINGAPORE, May 13 (Reuters) – The trading arm of Vietnam’s state oil company has urged the U.S. Navy to allow a crude oil tanker laden with Iraqi oil to sail through its blockade in the Middle East Gulf to provide a Vietnamese refinery with critical supplies, PVOIL said in a letter on Tuesday.

The U.S. military has expanded its shipping blockade on Iran to include cargoes deemed contraband, although it has said other oil exports from the Gulf are free to sail through.

The Maltese-flagged Agio Fanourios I supertanker, carrying 2 million barrels of crude oil, sailed out of the Strait of Hormuz on May 10 and was sailing in the Gulf of Oman before making a U-turn on May 11, ship tracking data on the MarineTraffic platform showed on Tuesday.

“U.S. forces redirected the vessel as part of ongoing enforcement of the blockade against Iran,” the U.S. military’s Central Command said in a statement in response to a Reuters query about the tanker.

It was not clear from the statement if the U.S. Navy would eventually allow the vessel to proceed to Vietnam as requested.

The vessel had sailed through the Strait of Hormuz on Sunday using Iran’s designated route for tankers, according to Iran’s semi-official Tasnim news agency.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has prompted the closure of the Strait of Hormuz with hundreds of ships stranded and global energy supplies disrupted from the critical waterway through which 20% of the world’s energy supplies pass.

“This cargo is of extreme importance to Nghi Son Refinery (NSRP), to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and to the Vietnamese people,” Petrovietnam Oil Corporation (PVOIL) Vice President Hoang Dinh Tung said in a May 12 letter seen by Reuters and sent to U.S. military and diplomatic missions.

“NSRP’s feedstock inventories are critically low; any further delay risks halting refinery throughput, with cascading consequences for millions of Vietnamese consumers,businesses, public services and industries.”

PVOIL said it “unequivocally” confirmed that the vessel loaded Iraqi Basra crude sold by Iraq’s state oil company SOMO after the tanker was loaded between April 10 and 14.

(Reporting by Florence Tan, Jonathan Saul and Phil Stewart; Additional reporting by Timothy Gardner and Idrees Ali; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani and Tom Hogue)